Cot Death

On me back, John!

As the birth of young Marty loomed Leanne began preparing the surveillance apparatus we would require to ensure Marty’s survival in the rough and tumble world of the nursery. Apparently we would need a movement monitor, definitely a sound monitor and most probably a CCTV video camera. I dare say that, if left to her own devices, Leanne would have added armed guards, watch towers, an air ambulance on permanent stand-by and a dedicated hot line to the local A&E.

And why were we doing all of this? Because of ‘Cot death’, or ‘SIDS’ as they prefer to call it these days.

To be honest this is something I’d rather just ignore and pretend isn’t real but the sad reality is that a small number of babies die each year and no one really knows why. Rather than just say “Sorry we really haven’t the foggiest idea” doctors feel obliged to give the unknown a name “Sudden infant death syndrome”, for example, and then spend decades coming out with conflicting advice on what to do and not do about something that they may, or may not, know anything about. Of course the media then get in on the act, confusing and misrepresenting facts as the feeling takes them, until every parent in the land is thoroughly terrified.

We really did try to fight the paranoia that this all brings but we still ended up with a motion monitor that, quite literally, listens to every breath young Marty breathes and flashes up a cheerfully green light every time he makes the slightest of movements.

All the talk around SIDS really annoys me. You hear people talking about it as if they know what it is. They don’t! By definition it’s the death of an infant by an unknown means. Even giving it a name is misleading in that it implies that there is a single condition with a single cause, which is almost certainly not the case. Another problem is that most of the advice comes from ‘observation’ rather than experimentation; they observe that children sleeping on their backs don’t die from unknown causes as often as children sleeping on their front so the advice goes out that all children should now sleep on their backs.

At first sight this seems sane advice but it isn’t. For example, here’s another observation: “People with coughs are far more likely to die in a domestic fire.” This is a fact. So what do you do? Do you start taking cough medicine before you go to sleep at night? Do you fill your home with throat calming sprays and balms? No doubt this is the advice the media would be giving us if armed with our little "fact". But they'd be wrong, not because our observation is wrong, it isn't, but because what we observed is not a cause, it's an effect. The truth is that people who cough all the time invariably do so because they smoke and wandering around your home with a naked flame grasped in your hand increases the odds of you starting a lethal fire. The sane advice is to stop smoking but that wasn’t what was observed so that’s not the advice given.

According to the statisticians, the chances of your baby dying of SIDS is far greater if you are a young mother who is skint and hasn’t got a qualification to her name. This is a statistical fact and is utter bollocks because being poor and not having a GCSE (or whatever they call them these days) does not increase the risk of SIDS. However, bringing your child up in a small, unhealthy, damp ridden house probably does, and guess who lives in such places? Yup, young, poor mothers with little education.

Of course some people will point out that when New Zealand started asking all mothers to put their babies to sleep on their backs, the incidence of SIDS went down. This is true, but then it was going down before they started to put babies on their backs.

A comparison comes from the plumbing & heating industry. When ‘Corgi’ came into force to regulate gas engineers, deaths due to faulty gas appliances dropped dramatically; ergo Corgi saved lives! Well you might be right, but you probably aren’t. Corgi came into being at much the same time as room-sealed boilers hit the market. These are 1000’s of times safer than the old boilers and it is almost certainly this innovation that caused the dramatic drop off in gas related deaths.

The same may well be true with putting babies on their backs, in that poor mattresses might have been the root cause and changes in the design and the materials they were made from meant that the incidence of SIDS was already dropping.

Finally, the problem with putting babies on their backs is that they really don’t like it. They sleep less and they don’t sleep as well. As a result early development is slower when compared to babies who sleep on their fronts. So how did the medical fraternity choose to tackle this fact? Well the choice was to tell the majority of parents who listened to your advice that their child was now developmentally retarded... or just redefine normal! So that's what they did; “normal” development is now slower than it used to be and what were once regarded as “normal” babies sleeping on their fronts are now considered “advanced”! I kid you not!

So at the end of all this we’re left knowing as little about what to do and not to do as we were when we started. And why am I wittering on about all of this? Well, last week, at 4am the monitoring device keeping an eye on Marty went off and the alarm started screaming out through the night.

Leanne leapt out of bed and then spent what seemed like half an hour trying to turn the bedroom light on - although it was probably no more than 10 seconds. Having done that she stood frozen at the foot of the cot whilst I yelled “Poke him! Poke him!”

Fortunately, before we were both wholly over run with panic, Marty farted, said “Ooooh” and kicked a leg out and from this we figured that he was probably still alive.

What had happened was that he’d managed to work his way to the very top of the cot and then turn himself around so he was sideways to the cot itself. This meant he was no longer lying on the monitor and so the alarm sounded.

When I asked Leanne why she froze she replied that she hadn’t froze, she was merely trying to figure out how to check that he wasn’t dead without waking him up!

Father's Day



My life as a fishing float

Well I have just experienced my first ever Father’s Day, and jolly good it was too. In time honoured tradition I wore a t-shirt with “I’m the Daddy” writ large upon it, whilst Marty wore a top with “My Daddy rocks” scrawled across it for the world to read. Armoured with such announcements we spent the day forlornly looking for mushrooms and then far more successfully swimming in the local baths.



This was the first time I’d ever been to the local pool but I suspect it will now become a regular Sunday afternoon fixture as Marty seemed to really enjoy himself, despite the fact that he was wearing a bright blue suit stuffed full of polystyrene that made him look like a fishing float with red hair. I’m not too sure of this ‘float suit’ from a safety point of view as I got the impression it could just as easily float him upside down as the right way up but we survived intact regardless.



So what else has been happening? Well Marty has pretty muched doubled in size over the last 4 months and, judging by the amount of drool he secretes every minute of the day, most of this gain has been taken up by enormous great saliva glands that must now occupy at least 40% of his total body weight. If you pick him up for more than 10 minutes you have to wring out your shirt afterwards and we can’t go anywhere without a collection of absorbent cloths to soak up the trails of slobber that he leaves behind him. It’s like living with a bloody great snail.



The other bizarre aspect of babies is the effect altitude has on them; they cry, you pick them up and they stop. You sit down with them and they start crying again! Nothing but nothing has changed other than their height above the ground.

Spot the difference

With this in mind my first theory was that babies have an inbuilt altitude sensor that stops them crying whenever they exceed an altitude of 5ft. Then I remembered a long haul flight where the kid in the seat behind me cried for a solid eight hours despite the plane maintaining a steady 35,000 ft. Then I remembered that that was a pressurised cabin and that he’d have probably stopped crying if I’d just opened a window... and there was a point in the flight where I was sorely tempted to do just that.

Car Booting for baby



I am cute. You will do my bidding



I must admit that when people said that having a baby would change my life I never realised they were referring to car boot sales.

Before Marty’s arrival I’d never been a fan of ‘car booting’. Wandering a field filled with al fresco tat struck me as an utter waste of time, the middle class equivalent of scouring the municipal tip; same garbage, higher prices.

However, I have now come to realise that, whilst there are still far too many people trying to off load the sort of stuff that any right thinking person would have consigned to the bin a long time ago, there is also a hard core of parents running what amounts to a ‘swap shop’. It’s brilliant!

It’s not that I don’t like buying new stuff but the fact is that they grow out of things so fast you’ve barely had time to get your new purchase out of the box before it’s redundant.

For example, we want something to keep Marty upright. He’s started sitting up now but he’s yet to develop anything remotely like a sense of balance, so he needs some sort of support. Well they do a rubber ring affair for just this eventuality and how much does it cost in the shops? £15! For a rubber ring! A rubber ring he’ll be able to fit in for about 3 weeks! So we’re off to the car boot sale to see if we can pick one up for a fiver.

It’s the same with shoes. A baby shoe can set you back a small fortune so we’re buying second hand. After all three month old babies are not renowned for their long distance treks so I think it’s safe to say that the shoes will be in decent shape.

Actually, when I think about it, why are we buying him shoes in the first place? Surely this is like buying your goldfish a bike? We might as well go the whole hog and buy him a set of hiking boots and a rucksack for all the good it will do him.

Aside from car boot sales what else has been happening? Well Marty can now giggle! He’s been able to ‘Gii’ and ‘Ooo’ and ‘Aah’ for a while now but he couldn’t manage the true, full on, ‘giggle’. Well now he can and I must say, it’s been worth the wait.

Changing times

Changing times

Well at 15 weeks Marty got his 15 minutes of fame, or at least 7 of them.

In the meantime, his mother got to be eloquent on the telly and I got to look and sound like a right numpty. I was going to post the links to this televisual experience but it would appear that the news teams have moved on and young Marty’s brief flirtation with fame is at an end.

So aside from getting to say “goo” to the nation what has been happening? Well not much to be frank.

Don’t babies develop slowly!

I’m not sure what I was expecting by 3 months. I was fairly certain my car was safe and that he wouldn’t be asking to borrow the keys any time soon but I did think he’d maybe be crawling by now and uttering the occasional word, but not a bit of it.

Just to check that we weren’t bringing up a dullard I went on-line to check for Autism and other such things. I'm not sure it was the best of ideas as the advice is hardly definitive and I was still left with "Hey, Up! He's not looking at me! I've been usurped by the curtains as a point of interest! Call the doctor!" 

I think we're alright though as, whilst he might have an unnautral affinity for the drapes, he is at least making lots of noise, and apparently that's a good thing. From what I read, if your baby makes no discernable voluntary noises within the first 12 months you either have an issue with autism.... or you need to get your hearing checked.

So, aside from my own paranoia, Marty is getting on fine, in fact he has made some major breakthroughs. Only last week he suddenly stopped waggling his arms and legs around in a wholly random fashion and settled down to very carefully stare at his hand.

You could see the soliloquy running through his head “Is this a hand which I see before me, the fingers waggling? Come, let me clutch thee!”

This lasted a good few minutes and since then he has been actively reaching out to grasp things, only stopping to stare at his digits and run through another Shakespearean monologue.

At the weekend I was sure he was going to be left handed as he was reaching for everything with his left hand. Just to throw my theory out of the window he’s now started reaching for things with his right hand. So at least he knows he’s got two, which can only be a good thing.

All is also improving on the fatherhood front. I have finally managed to get him into those suits which only come with buttons and few, if any, poppers. What’s more we managed this without the shedding of tears by either party. In fact we’ve got into quite a morning routine: I pick him up and let him have a good stretch. Then I lay him down on his changing mat and give him a few moments to stare at himself in the wardrobe mirror. Satisfied that he still exists I now open the nappy to see what the damage is, at which point Marty breaks into a huge grin and gurgles like a good ‘un during the entire nappy changing routine.

I guess it’s only right that he should enjoy people wiping his arse. There is after all only a very brief moment in life when all concerned get a genuine joy out of this.

IVF and eggs

An oeuf is an oeuf

Well it looks as if Marty is going to have to learn to write pretty soon just to sign autographs.

Yup, we appear to have become famous, or at least far more famous than we ever were... which wasn’t difficult on account of us not being famous at all.

It all boils down to the wonders of IVF and egg white. Not content with just being the base ingredient of the culinary wonder that is meringue, eggs have branched out into the medical world and become the prime component in the creation of young Marty, or ‘Chicken boy’ as I might start to call him.

It all started when we tried, and failed, to have a baby. So we tried a bit more... and failed a bit more. So we had some tests and, sadly, these came back with the most damning verdict of all; ‘unknown infertility’. This was bad because it wasn’t an answer; I was fertile, Leanne was fertile, it should be working for us but it wasn’t and no one knew why.

So what do you do? If they’d told me:

‘Look, your balls have fallen off, we're all dreadfully sorry about it but we can’t find them anywhere so we're afraid you can’t have kids’

At least I’d have had a definite answer and we’d have had to move on in our lives.

After all, it’s not as if there’s a shortage of people in the world, we still had each other and, if the worst came to the worst, we could always borrow a niece or nephew to look after us in our dotage.

But a diagnosis of ‘unknown’ just leaves you with frustrated hope and, with something as emotively primal as having a baby, you can’t just turn your back on this hope.

So we tried IVF and were shocked when it failed. So we tried again and were utterly devastated when that also failed. So Leanne hit Google and started to find out as much as she could about the subject and what came up time after time was ‘immunology issues’, specifically the book by Alan E. Beer "Is your body baby friendly". Sadly Mr Beer is no longer with us, but Marty and many other youngsters are here because of him.

So off we went to the experts at CARE and we were told that this was an area they were currently working on and we could have some ‘Chicago tests’ if we wanted. So we did the tests and they came back saying that Leanne and I shared some common genes that might make it more difficult for the embryo to defend itself in the womb. On top of this Leanne also had a very active immune system and that would make it still harder for the embryo to win through.

Finally! We had some definite causes and, hopefully, a solution that wouldn’t require us to remortgage the house.

And this is where the egg white came in; apparently it works by helping to suppress the body’s immune system and, almost as importantly, it achieves this cheaply and with few, if any, adverse reactions.

Well there we go; eat a couple of extra large omelettes, add a bit of mayo and finish with a baked Alaska for desert and Leanne would be pregnant before you could say ‘More please sir’.

Obviously it was a little more complicated than that... but not by much; Leanne had to have an ‘intralipid’ drip just before egg transfer and a second one once we knew she was pregnant.. and that was it! Bob’s your uncle, Marty’s your son.

The tale of our endeavours seems to have interested the press, with first our local newspaper, the ‘Grantham journal’, running a Mother’s Day story and now the Mail on-line taking an interest. And today we got a call from Central News asking if we’d like to be on the telly!

One of the other medical issues with all this is that, if Leanne had got pregnant naturally, there’s a good chance that her immune system would have started to attack the foetus and she’d have miscarried – or at least have been at high risk of a miscarriage.

Which makes me wonder if this is a possible treatment for some of those women who have had multiple miscarriages?

The madness....

Being a parent is like moving into a new flat only to discover that your flat mate owns the entire collected works of “Black lace” and isn’t afraid to play them. In this instance it isn’t ‘Agadoo’ blaring out through the night. Oh no, it’s far, far worse... it’s “Baa, baa black sheep”... and what's more you can't pack your bags and find another flat!

Marty loves lying on the floor and looking up at his mobile as blue frogs and yellow monkeys slowly pass by, and I for one do not have a problem with this. Sadly, the utter bastards that make these mobiles can’t leave it at oddly coloured fabric creatures. Oh no! They have to go and add music. So, whilst Marty waves his arms and gurgles incoherently, his attentive parent is driven slowly up the wall by the vile hordes of the Fisher price orchestra and their reggae rendition of ‘Baa, baa bloody black sheep’  

What is it with nursery rhymes that makes them stick to the inside of your brain like congealed porridge? I’ve spent the last week getting on with my work, minding my own business, only to discover that I’ve been humming “We went to the animal fair...” to anyone who cared to listen.

I’ve got a theory that, whilst “Mummy” and “Daddy” might be the first words your child actually speaks, the impetus behind this urge to talk is the need to scream out:

“In the name of all that is holy, will you please, please, turn that bloody music off before I throttle you with my rattle.”

Mind you, I could be wrong. In fact it has to be said that Marty seems a little less than delighted when I turn the music off in an attempt to stop my brains running out through my ears.

I suspect that ear plugs might feature large in my future.... that or a padded cell.

Going green

It's not easy being green

One of my concerns when Marty arrived was how “green” we were going to be as parents. I just don’t like ‘disposable’ whether it’s razor blades or shopping bags; you use it a few times, throw it away, and it spends the next 1000 years in a land fill site. It might provide endless fascination for future archaeologists but it's astonishingly wasteful.

That said we now have a poo-machine in the family; a tiny creature cunningly designed by nature to defecate and urinate on an almost continuous basis. It is not unknown for me to change a nappy and have barely got the new one on before he’s farted for Britain and I’m fetching a replacement.

At the current rate Marty is going to need his own Landfill site before the year is out and sadly he is not alone; in the USA they go through 20 billion disposable diapers a year! Not only is that a very big number all by itself but it can take 500 years for a disposable nappy to degrade. 500 lots of 20 billion! That's almost as much as a bankers bonus! All in all, if we don't change our ways we're looking at our children growing up in a world of nappy mountains – the vast windswept 'Pampers' to the south, the rugged 'Huggies' range to the north.

But I do not want to spend the next 3 years – or how ever long this is going to last – knee deep in poo-plastered cotton towelling and living in a house that smells of week old urine.

So what do you do? Well, as Kermit said "It's not easy being green", whilst there are a number of ‘green’ nappies out there - most of which involve a washable outer covering and a disposable liner, some of which are even flushable or compostable - they are not cheap. Some just plainly cost a fortune, others aren't too bad but do involve a fairly large initial outlay and, when you’re as stony broke as we are, that’s a bit of a barrier.

Why is it that the leading manufacturers can’t produce a nappy that’s biodegradable and cheap? Surely making something out of a petroleum product is expensive and making it out of a recycled, degradable product is cheap?.... Obviously it isn’t but it certainly should be and I suspect it would be if the big manufacturers pulled their collective fingers out and actually took a proactive lead on these matters.

The other green area we’re going to be looking at over the coming months is food; do you buy baby food or do you make your own from organic foods? Fortunately we both like cooking so I think we’ll at least try the cook-your-own stuff.

On the organic front you only have to look at the amount of pesticides and heavy metals most of us now carry in our bodies to realise that it’s probably a good idea to buy organic when it comes to the little fella.

I dare say Jeremy Clarkson would disagree but then he’s become so mutated by petrol and pesticides that he now talks out of his arse, and apparently has done for some time!